The African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) is a pan-African multilateral financial institution, headquartered in Cairo, created in 1993 to finance and promote intra- and extra-African trade. With total assets in the tens of billions of dollars, it is one of the continent's most important sources of trade finance and the publisher of the annual African Trade Report, a leading reference on African trade data.

How much of Africa's trade is with other African countries?

Only around 15% of African trade is with other African countries, according to Afreximbank research — compared with roughly 60% intra-regional trade in Asia and nearly 70% in Europe. Raising this share is the central goal of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

What is the African trade finance gap?

The African trade finance gap — the difference between the trade finance African businesses need and what banks actually provide — is estimated at around $100 billion per year by Afreximbank and the African Development Bank. Small and medium enterprises are hit hardest, with rejection rates for trade finance applications far above those of large corporates.

The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) is a cross-border payments infrastructure developed by Afreximbank in partnership with the African Union and AfCFTA Secretariat. It allows African companies to pay each other in their own local currencies without routing transactions through dollars or euros, with estimated savings of billions of dollars annually in hard-currency transaction costs.

The 7 Numbers That Matter From Afreximbank's African Trade Report

Every year, the African Export-Import Bank publishes its African Trade Report — the single most authoritative dataset on how Africa trades, with whom, in what, and at what cost. And every year it suffers the fate of most institutional research: cited by economists, skimmed by policymakers, and unread by the investors who would profit most from its contents.

This briefing distils the report's recurring core findings — supplemented by African Development Bank and AfCFTA Secretariat data — into the seven numbers that define the African trade opportunity. Full attributions and links to the original research are at the end. Where figures shift between annual editions, we state them as ranges rather than false precision.

1. Fifteen Percent — The Number That Explains Everything

Roughly 15% of Africa's trade is with other African countries. Sit with that. Asia's intra-regional share is around 60%. Europe's approaches 70%. African economies, by contrast, overwhelmingly trade past each other — shipping raw materials to other continents and importing finished goods back.

This is the number the entire AfCFTA project exists to change, and it is the single most important statistic in African economics. Every percentage point of improvement represents billions of dollars of manufacturing, logistics, and financial-services activity moving onshore. For investors, the trade is straightforward: the companies that operationalise intra-African commerce — regional banks, logistics operators, payment networks — are levered to this number rising. Several of them, including Ecobank and the major Nigerian and Kenyan lenders, are constituents of the Africa 30 Index.

2. $100 Billion — The Trade Finance Gap

Afreximbank and the African Development Bank estimate the continent's trade finance gap at roughly $100 billion per year — the difference between the letters of credit, guarantees, and working capital African businesses need to trade, and what the banking system actually provides. SMEs bear the brunt: their trade finance applications are rejected at rates several times higher than large corporates', usually for lack of collateral or correspondent banking relationships.

Why investors should care: a financing gap is unmet demand with an interest rate attached. It explains the rapid growth of African trade-finance funds, fintech lenders, and Afreximbank's own expanding balance sheet. It is also the quiet reason African bank margins remain structurally higher than developed-market peers — scarcity pricing on credit.

3. ~$1.3 Trillion — The Size of the Prize

Africa's total merchandise trade runs at around $1.3–1.4 trillion annually. That is real scale — comparable to the total trade of a mid-sized G20 economy — yet it represents under 3% of world trade for a continent with 18% of the world's population. The gap between those two percentages is, depending on your temperament, an indictment or an investment thesis. We hold the second view, for reasons the continent's growth data supports: Africa remains the world's second-fastest-growing region.

4. ~$280 Billion — The China Relationship

China has been Africa's largest single trading partner for over a decade, with bilateral trade near $280–300 billion a year — roughly a fifth of the continent's total. The composition is the story: African exports to China are dominated by raw materials (the minerals we mapped in our natural resources ranking), while imports are overwhelmingly manufactured goods.

The strategic question for the next decade is whether that composition shifts — whether processing, refining, and manufacturing migrate onto African soil. The DRC's export quotas, Morocco's automotive success, and battery-materials plants under discussion across the copperbelt all point the same direction. Watch the composition, not the headline.

5. Seventy Percent — The Commodity Trap

Around 70% or more of Africa's export value comes from primary commodities — unprocessed oil, metals, and agricultural goods. Afreximbank's research returns to this finding annually because it is the structural weakness beneath everything else: commodity exporters import global price volatility and export their manufacturing jobs. It is the macro version of the resource curse we have written about before, and the reason value-addition policies — export bans on raw ores, local-processing requirements — are spreading across the continent regardless of what free-trade orthodoxy says about them.

6. Billions Saved — PAPSS and the Currency Problem

Until recently, a Ghanaian company paying a Kenyan supplier routed the payment through New York or London — cedis to dollars, dollars to shillings, fees and delay at every hop. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), built by Afreximbank with the African Union, allows those transactions to settle directly in local currencies. Afreximbank has estimated the potential savings at around $5 billion a year in hard-currency transaction costs as adoption scales.

PAPSS is the kind of infrastructure we argued for in Africa Doesn't Need More Aid — It Needs Better Capital Infrastructure: unglamorous plumbing that compounds. Every bank that joins the network makes the AfCFTA more real than any summit communiqué.

7. $450 Billion — What Full AfCFTA Implementation Is Worth

The World Bank has estimated that full implementation of the AfCFTA could raise African incomes by around $450 billion by 2035 and lift tens of millions of people out of poverty, with intra-African exports rising dramatically as tariff and non-tariff barriers fall. Afreximbank's own scenario work points the same direction. Implementation is running behind the ambition — our review of AfCFTA's fourth year covers which corridors are actually delivering — but the destination is not in doubt, and neither is which companies collect the toll along the way.

What We Take From All Seven

Read together, the numbers describe a continent that trades far below its weight, pays too much to finance and settle what it does trade, and exports its value-addition to other continents — with every one of those deficits now being attacked simultaneously by AfCFTA, PAPSS, trade-finance expansion, and industrial policy. Deficits being closed are, for investors, simply growth that has not happened yet.

The practical route to positioning for it: the banks, telecoms, logistics and consumer companies listed on African exchanges — the universe our Africa 30 Index tracks daily in USD, and that our guide to investing in African markets shows you how to access.

Sources & Attribution

This briefing summarises and analyses findings from the African Export-Import Bank's annual African Trade Report (available at afreximbank.com), supplemented by African Development Bank trade-finance surveys, World Bank AfCFTA modelling (The African Continental Free Trade Area: Economic and Distributional Effects), and AfCFTA Secretariat data. All figures are restated in our own words, presented as ranges where editions differ, and remain the intellectual property of their publishers — we encourage readers to consult the original reports. Figures will be updated as new editions are released. Nothing here constitutes investment advice.